David Letterman Calls Donald Trump ‘A Person To Be Shunned’

Letterman Says His Show Would Have Attacked Trump

The legendary former talk show host called Donald Trump “a person to be shunned” and said he was “flattered” that the Hillary Clinton campaign used a clip from his show in an attack ad.

On Friday, David Letterman took aim at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times. Before his presidential bid, Trump had been a frequent guest on Letterman’s Late Show. Letterman went so far as to call him a perfect guest:

“I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time, and I always thought he was exactly what New York City needed to have: the big blowhard billionaire. ‘By God, I’m Donald Trump, and I date models, and I put up buildings, and everything is gold.’ Nobody took him seriously, and people loved him when he would come on the show. I would make fun of his hair, I would call him a slumlord, I would make fun of his ties. And he could just take a punch like nothing. He was the perfect guest.”

“So now, he decides he’s running for president. And right out of the box, he goes after immigrants and how they’re drug dealers and they’re rapists. And everybody swallows hard. And they think, oh, well, somebody will take him aside and say, “Don, don’t do that.” But it didn’t happen. And then, I can remember him doing an impression, behind a podium, of a reporter for The New York Times who has a congenital disorder. And then I thought, if this was somebody else — if this was a member of your family or a next-door neighbor, a guy at work — you would immediately distance yourself from that person. And that’s what I thought would happen. Because if you can do that in a national forum, that says to me that you are a damaged human being. If you can do that, and not apologize, you’re a person to be shunned.”

Letterman went on to say he would have used his show to go after Trump:

“If I had a show, I would have gone right after him. I would have said something like, ‘Hey, nice to see you. Now, let me ask you: what gives you the right to make fun of a human who is less fortunate, physically, than you are?’”

He continued:

“And maybe that’s where it would have ended. Because I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t know anything about trade agreements. I don’t know anything about China devaluing the yuan. But if you see somebody who’s not behaving like any other human you’ve known, that means something. They need an appointment with a psychiatrist. They need a diagnosis and they need a prescription.”